Local businesses often have limited targeted markets and in Dubai and all around the UAE most of the time all small and local businesses are often not so interested in digital marketing and social media. Local businesses and small organizations usually have limited resources and that is another reason why they the social media have been neglected for many years. However things are changing since last year, now a days more businesses are starting to focus on their social and online presence. The UAE is a very modern and technologically advanced country, almost everyone have access to the internet the social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc are very popular. There are several studies and data collected which is suggesting that there are around 4.2 Billion social media users worldwide and they spend around 2 Hours and 30 minutes on the social media daily. This is staggering. That is why social media platforms and digital marketing are very important for local businesses.
The social media platforms are not paid all the time, only if you want to run advertisement campaigns you will have to pay. Having a Facebook page, Instagram Profile or Twitter Account costs you nothing. You can immediately start posting on any social media platform you like. A good brand appearance on social media platform can also boost your sales and leads. There are certain examples where the entire business has been established on a social media platform. But it is very important that whatever you are doing on social media could also have negative impacts too. The most usual mistake business do is to post or opine about political issues or any other sensitive topic. So avoid such things and focus on promoting your products and services, utilize the social media platforms as a mode of communication and run brand awareness and other advertisement campaigns on social media.
Here are 6 tips to use social media for local business and achieve your sales and marketing objectives to ensure steady growth and expansion:
Tip 1: Make a Plan and Set Goals
Not only in Dubai, UAE but all around the world, small businesses often complain that they are not getting much from their social media efforts. The main reason always behind is that they don’t have a proper plan, they just start posting on social media pages and profiles and then expect their sales and leads will skyrocket immediately. That is not the case. To begin with you must have to do some market research, it is not difficult. You just need to understand the basics of each social media, for example the Instagram and Snapchat are good for generating leads for cloths, retail items, car accessories, etc. However if you are selling network devices and such equipment the LinkedIn will be a more appropriate platform as it is a social media for professional, you can easily target IT managers, Procurement Offices and Purchase Engineers who might be interested in buying network devices and IT equipment. That is how you can plan for your social media campaigns.
You should put your products and services in front and then analyze the social media platform and decide which social media requires more work to do. Then set up your goals and objectives too. For example currently you are getting 10 daily enquiries from all online mediums, you can set your goal to double this number after 3 months of brand awareness on social media platforms. You should also do research on your competitors and analyze their social media strategy. Note down which platform they are most active at and what all social media platforms they are working at. It is also very important that you work on all popular social media platforms, but in order to generate high quality leads and to achieve your goals and objective, only the appropriate social media platform will be able to help you.
Tip 2: Carefully Choose the Social Media Platforms
Local Business operating in Dubai and all around the UAE often make this mistake, the management or owner thinks that they should be active on all social media platforms, they should reach out to all types of audiences and this will increase their online leads. But that is not the case. What actually happen is that in the beginning local businesses remains very active, then eventually they start feeling the heat and feel overwhelmed with the amount of work and time they are investing in, then the businesses start distrusting social media and eventually stop working on them or at least reduce the efforts and resources they are investing in. However, if you choose only a few social media platforms and start focusing on them you will end up generating more good quality leads. Local business owners or management often rely on their instinct and without any research select the most popular social media platforms and start working on them. That strategy is also not very effective.
The only way to decide which social media platforms will be suitable for you is to analyze your customers, for example the customer’s age is a very good classification in the social media platforms. Let say you are selling the items which are designed for teenagers and young people ranging between 15 to 30 years old or maybe 35. Now a person of my age (32) could think that Instgram and Tiktok is more popular among this age range. However, 1/4th of the Facebook users also lies in this range. So, rather than trusting your instinct it is better to do a little bit of research, you can easily Google these stats and data for any platform and then decide which platform is having the more right audience in your targeted demographic and geographic ranges. It is always best to target all popular social media platforms. For example the TikTok is an emerging platform, it is getting tremendous attentions from all demographic ranges of the users, big enterprises and multinationals are also experimenting with this platform. Similarly all other platforms have their own significance, it entirely depends upon your products/services, customers and your targeted regions. So, chose social media platforms wisely and do a little bit research beforehand.
Tip 3: Expand Your Audience
Another great advantage of social media platforms is that they allow you to easily expand your audience. Start with analyzing your existing customers. Compile detailed data. Then analyze your existing social media platforms. You can also find a popular tool which can help you with your research. As the social media platforms allow you to micro-target any audience group, it is critical that you are targeting the right audience. Find as much data from as many sources as possible and analyze it carefully. The purpose of this data collection and analysis is to define how is buying your products, who is sharing them on social media the most, who is buying from online or sending you enquiries through online mediums or directly through your social media profiles and pages. Then identify distinguishable audience groups. These audience groups will be the people who will be most interested in buying your products or you can also say that with your existing brand identity these audience groups will return better conversion rates.
Once your audience is identified now it is time to expand your audience. For local businesses the biggest advantage is that they are usually targeting only a certain area or region, so targeting another region is lot easier using the social media platforms and their advertisement tools. For example in Facebook there is a feature of ‘lookalike audience’ this feature lets you target the people with similar interests in other regions and is a great way to expand your audience. There are so many other tools that also help you in expanding your audience. Even in case if you are not ready to reach out the other regions or any such reason, you can still tweak your targeted audiences in the same region and expand your audience. Another great method to expand your audiences in to work with the hashtags, no social media strategy is complete with the hashtags. You can research and shortlist hashtags as per your audience and future plans. You can use hashtags for areas and locations to target more precisely and you can also use popular hashtags to improve your brand’s visibility in the social media.
Tip 4: Establish Relationship with Your Social Media Audience
The market research and studies have shown that almost 45 percent of the internet users use social media platforms to do a brand research. It means people are not only searching in Google, but people are also searching in social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. This can be utilized as a great advantage for your social media and digital marketing strategy. Like I have mentioned, the hashtags are a great method to target desired audiences. A local business can utilize hashtags to make their brand more visible in social media searches. Whenever people reach to your posts or adverts and interacts with your brand it is very important that you respond to them or acknowledge them, this build a relationship of trust and loyalty. It helps encouraging people to like and share your content whether it is ads or posts. This also provides a free exposure to your brand and social media platforms take such interactions as a signal for quality and trust and ranks such pages, profiles and their content higher in their searches.
Let us talk about the Facebook. In Facebook there is always around one thousand posts that can be potentially posted on a user’s timeline when they are scrolling through it, it is those interaction by which Facebook algorithms know that a user might want to see this post or profile or content again. Thus Facebook algorithms automatically put such content on top and your brand gets more exposure for free. In addition to that if a local business is very active and engages with its customers and visitors by liking their comments or by replying them or by creating exclusive groups, etc., it will be lot easier to build a loyal fan following. The loyal social media fans are most likely to do more business and will also like and share your content. Which will help you further generate more leads.
Tip 5: Post Good Quality Content
The content is the backbone of any digital marketing strategy, whether it is adverts or social media posts, the content is always the king. It is a common belief and a known fact that for any successful social media marketing campaign the user engagement is the most important factor. The user engagements can be improved only by publishing quality content. For the content the best strategy is 80% by 20% rule. The 80% is generic content which is either trending or is relevant to your niche or even if it is not relevant it should have to be interesting and the 20% of the content should be about your brand promotions, products, services, offers, sales tactics and such material. This content strategy will ensure the most engaging social media audience for your brand with the highest possible conversion rate. Here in Dubai and all around the UAE businesses often only post about their products, services, or sometimes the occasional press releases, which is not a right strategy. An online user can find all that information on your website too, however, the social media platform is where people like only the most interesting content.
Including fan and followers, mentioning followers and engaging with influencer is also a good content strategy. These days’ social media influencers are emerging as a great source of localized audience. For a small business even an influencer with one thousand to two thousand followers or fans will also be good and could bring sufficient traffic. Creating polls and contests is also a great way to have quality social media feeds. Such way the local businesses can establish a very vibrant and connected social media channels. Another great advantage of social media for a local business is that it can easily communicate with their audience. Usually there are only a few to 20 or maximum 30 private conversations or messages so it is easier for the manager to communicate with them all and maintain a personalized communication as well. It is also easier to keep an eye on ongoing trends and post content related to those trends. Such content is very helpful. In additional to that hashtags are extremely important, use popular hashtags as well as branded hashtags in your content and encourage your audience to share them. This will help increasing visibility of the brand across social media platforms.
Read More: RealEstate Website Trends for 2021-22
Tip 6: Use Analytics and Social Media Tools
All social media platforms provide very interactive and detailed analytical reports and dashboards. These dashboards will help you understanding your audiences, and popularity of your content. You can easily monitor which type of content is viewed most and which is shared the most. For example sometimes some content/post got very high and unusual impressions but very low clicks or below average clicks, that means the topic is very popular but the content was not good enough to encourage a visitor to click on it. This is how you can evaluate your content and then make your content strategy and hashtag planning accordingly to get more visibility. That was just one example, there are so many valuable statistical information available in the dashboard that will help you improving your targeted audience as well as the content quality and overall social media strategy. Each social media platform is slightly different form each other, the administrative control panels’ look and feel is different, however the main objective is to understand the effectiveness of your campaign and to highlight the areas of improvements.
There are so many social media tools available in the market. These tools can save a lot of efforts and can make things more organized and easy for the small business owners and managers. Basically these tools automate a lot of your processes, you can schedule and plan social media content beforehand and these tools will post the content as per the plan automatically. In addition to that these tools also have highly advanced analytical and statistical reports which are also very helpful in improving and optimizing your social media marketing strategies. The social media management tools also provide great insight on the ongoing trends, highly accurate and precise data on hashtags and other helpful information which further simplify the research work and make businesses able to execute more effective social media campaigns.
Read More: How to Start an E-Commerce Business: A Step-by-Step Guide
Conclusion
The awareness about the social media marketing and importance of social media platform is increasing day by day. Earlier small and local businesses often don’t invest in digital marketing and don’t manage social media profiles very actively, now a days, especially due to the impact of the year 2020 the things have changed. Now local businesses are more focused on only strategies than ever before. Another great advantage of the online and digital marketing is that it is way too cheaper than conventional marketing and the businesses can easily target their audiences on bases of demographic and geographic parameters. Digital marketing is not only about advertising on social media platforms but an active social media presence is way too effective and long term than the paid campaigns. Local businesses have limited regions to market and limited audiences. Which makes it much easier to execute successful social media campaigns. You can even start now by creating social media pages and profiles on your desired social media platforms. Make a plan, do some research, chose social media platforms, prepare content, make a content strategy, and you are good to go.
It is important that local businesses proactively pursue their visitors to establish a more personalized relationship with their audience. The best practice is to respond to comments, like people’s enforcements, tag your fan and followers, respond to their questions and enquiries and be active on all your social media platforms. Local businesses and small organizations often think that if they create pages and profiles on all available social media platforms they will be able to get more exposure but that is not the case, in reality you should only choose the required social media platforms and focus on them and be very active on them. It is always better to use some social media marketing tool, there are so many available, and are very effective and helpful in both social media profile management and paid advertisements. These tools also provide intensive statistical and analytical data which will be very helpful in evaluating your campaign strategies and it also help in identifying the areas of improvements. RSI Concepts is a leading digital marketing service provider in Dubai, UAE. We provide a complete range of digital marketing services which includes both social media profiles/accounts management and paid digital advertisements or paid social media marketing as well. Feel free to reach us through our Contact Us page or leave a comment in the comment box below and we will get in touch with you soon.
Check out this : Impact of Web Designing on Digital Marketing
